Prior to initiating proposal development assistance, applicants must complete a few preliminary steps.
To get started, make sure you have completed IPart’s ‘Do I Qualify? ’ form. Completing this form provides IPart with preliminary information, we use to help counsel you on potential federal agency and topic matching prioritization. If you have already submitted your NSF Project Pitch (PP) and received a response back from the NSF, please send both your NSF email and your PP to IPart’s Exec. Dir., Kelly Wylam kelly.wylam@benfranklin.org. Similarly, if you have already had a conversation with the agency you plan to submit a proposal to, please send an email to Kelly with the hyperlink to the funding opportunity and a summary for your agency interaction/conversation. If you have not completed either of the noted actions, IPart can assist you with agency interactions and your NSF PP or development of a 1-Page Executive Summary for any of the other 10 SBIR/STTR offering agencies, prior to submission. Once you HAVE completed either of these steps, you’ll be ready to start working on your IPart Pre-Proposal (PPA – PhI), or your IPart Federal Marketing Assistance instrument (FMA –PhII). We will then work through the following steps in the IPart PPA Assistance Process, together.
The Innovation Partnership (IPart) has developed an agency-agnostic instrument called the IPart Pre-Proposal Template to assist SBIR/STTR applicants in flushing out core competency areas of their SBIR/STTR project, demanded to be more fully articulated in their full, federal SBIR/STTR proposal. Each section of the pre-proposal requires a client directly respond to the narrative information requested, in a succinct and clear manner. IPart will work with each client, providing 2-5 iterative feedback loops as appropriate, to improve the format, spelling, grammar, and readability of the responses while also ensuring each response is thorough, well-presented, and comprehensive for the reader. The goal of this exercise is to strengthen our clients’ ability to prepare competitive, high-quality grant proposals for submission to any of the 11 federal funding agencies offering these opportunities.
A Pre-Proposal Technical Review is offered to applicants whose proposal concepts have strong potential for competing successfully to win federal funding. These reviews, conducted by two subject matter experts (SMEs) provide comprehensive and valuable feedback to our clients in regard to the feasibility of their projects, their ability to thoroughly describe their project work, and review of their plans for testing and validating data. This valuable feedback is at no cost to the client.
All proposal concepts under review are fully protected by non-disclosure agreements to ensure confidentiality of proprietary information.
*Please note that if you have been accepted into either the DOE’s or the NIH’s Phase0 assistance program, we cannot assist you with a Technical Review through our PPA program due to our limited resources and duplicative nature of these federal Ph0 programs.
Following the Technical Review, both the feedback from the SMEs as well as the completed PPA will be forwarded to IPart’s Investment Committee for review and vote. This Committee is made up of highly esteemed, experienced professionals in the field who have significant experience with small business, innovation, and the SBIR/STTR federal funding program. These awards are competitive and not every client who completes a PPA and receives a Technical Review will receive one of these financial awards.
IPart applicants must select EITHER the MV or the MG funding opportunity, not both. However, the MV/MG award amounts are always at the discretion of the IPart Investment Committee.
Clients who are awarded a MicroVoucher (MV) from IPart will receive financial assistance that reimburses one-half of the cost incurred in preparing the proposal itself or up to $5,000, whichever is less. These awards are for Phase I SBIR/STTR proposal preparation. Payment of the MV award is made directly to a Preferred Provider (PDF) (SBIR/STTR grant assistance professional) for their services.
Click for full MicroVoucher Guidelines
Clients who are awarded a MicroGrant (MG) from IPart will receive financial assistance that reimburses one-half of the total cost (or up to $2,000, whichever is less) incurred in preparing the proposal itself. Payment is made directly to the client or company for the MG awards.